Museums With Ideas, Goals and Sometimes Art. But Walls? No.

From top, Jessica Turtle and Matt Turtle, the creators of the Museum of Homelessness in London, with David Tovey, a participating artist.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

By John Hanc

March 14, 2017

LONDON — Behind a wrought-iron gate and down a dark alleyway, in the basement of a turn-of-the-20th-century housing development for the poor, Jessica Turtle and her husband, Matt, are working to make their concept of a museum succeed.

In their small office on the lower level of the historic Peabody Housing Estates, just a few blocks from Victoria Station, Ms. Turtle explained her vision. “We wanted something that was creative and cultural,” she said, “and something that would transform the lives of those involved.”

What the Turtles have created is a museum that honors the harsh realities and the history of the homeless, an indigent population that Londoners call “rough sleepers.” Founded in early 2016, their Museum of Homelessness has a concept, a board, a couple of grants and a growing program of events. But there’s one thing conspicuously lacking: a physical space.

As such, the Museum of Homelessness is one of a number of small but innovative institutions in the United States and Europe built around often challenging concepts and lacking an actual building to give them literal form. “I find it very exciting and very promising,” Elizabeth Merritt, director of the Center for the Future of Museums of the American Alliance of Museums, said of the trend. “This experiment of untethering our assumption of ‘You start with a building, you start with a collection,’ may create dynamic new forms of museums that are really good at surviving in the future.”

The Museum of Homelessness is driven by a passionate interest in the subject. Ms. Turtle, whose own father endured a period of homelessness as a young man, describes herself as a museum activist and believes that the culture of the rough sleepers is worthy of enshrinement.

“I thought they were joking at first,” said the artist David Tovey, a formerly homeless British Army veteran, recalling his reaction when the Turtles approached him with their idea for the museum. “A lot of people who have been homeless won’t talk about it. They’re ashamed, embarrassed. But the museum is going to create a space for these people where they can tell their stories.”

Although, Ms. Turtle is quick to note, “space” is a relative term. “This is not about putting something in a glass box,” she said. “It’s about doing something special, about creating events where you’re taken on a journey.” The stories unfold in all kinds of public spaces: They could be presented at a theater, a homeless shelter, in one-time or temporary appearances at other cultural institutions, or even out on the street.

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“The Dosser’s Bible,” part of the Museum of Homelessness.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times

Similarly, there are no gallery interiors at the Street Art Museum in the gentrifying Nieuw-West section of Amsterdam. Aside from an office maintained for legal reasons (and as a home base for student interns), the museum exists as an assemblage of 90 commissioned works, across a 1.5-square-mile area, linked only by tours that it organizes. The artwork is on walls, meters, sidewalks; all of it was placed with the consent of local residents.

The Street Art Museum was founded in 2012 by Anna Stolyarova, a native of Ukraine. When she moved to Amsterdam in 1998, Ms. Stolyarova, a digital-advertising producer, became immersed in the city’s street art culture, much of it based around Nieuw-West. “This gave me an idea to create something I had not seen yet,” she said. “A ‘museum’ devoted to this form of art.”

While the museum lacks a permanent home and has a loose structure, it is fixed in its purpose. “Our focal point remains unchanged,” Ms. Stolyarova said. “To use the urban space and art on the streets to engage and entice.”

Engagement and innovation — as well as a bit of fun — are watchwords for another wall-less institution, the Museum of Joy in San Francisco.

Founded as a series of “happenings” around the city in late 2013, this museum celebrates the experience of joy through activities like a pop-up opera at a BART station; a popular candlelight-labyrinth beach walk at Baker Beach the day after Thanksgiving; and a so-called library of joy: tiny printed books recounting happy experiences collected online and hidden in gold-colored Easter eggs at 12 branches of the San Francisco Public Library for people to find.

The genesis of the Museum of Joy, said its founder, Jericha Senyak, goes back to her days as a curatorial student at Hampshire College a decade ago, when her instructors challenged her to think beyond the museum as being a collection of things housed within four walls.

“What do we hold as important and meaningful that is not conventionally collectible?” she recalls asking herself. “Emotions, dreams, experiences. Vital pieces of the human experience with no tangible form. Can you put those in a museum?”

Clare Patey and Roman Krznaric had a similar goal with a different human capacity in mind. Mr. Krznaric, an Australian philosopher who has written about empathy, contacted Ms. Patey, a British curator who had previously been involved with the experimental Museum Of in London, about the possibility of an artistic space devoted to sharing and understanding other people’s feelings.

The result is the Empathy Museum, which exists in the form of its main exhibit: a 10-foot-high, 30-foot-wide shipping container made up to look like a giant shoe box. Hung on the walls of the container are about 115 pairs of shoes worn by people in various occupations or cultures. Called “A Mile in My Shoes,” this exhibit, first shown in London in September 2015, provides an opportunity to learn about others’ lives by literally walking in their shoes (which are disinfected after every use).

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“A Mile in My Shoes,” a traveling exhibit that invites visitors to try on others’ footwear, is part of the Empathy Museum.CreditKate Raworth; produced by Artsadmin

While walking, visitors listen on iPods to professionally produced 10-to-12-minute-long recordings narrated by the shoes’ owners, who range from a prostitute to a surgeon to a drug dealer turned artist to an immigrant who is in the country illegally.

“We’re a museum about an emotion,” Ms. Patey said. “If you think of a traditional museum housing a collection of objects, we’re trying to build a collection of people.”

After walking and listening, visitors are invited to an adjacent space to reflect upon and discuss what they experienced and learned about these individuals. A few days later, the “shoe box” is whisked off to a new location.

Ms. Patey has taken the Empathy Museum to various parts of Britain and as far away as Australia. (She is now in discussions about appearances in several cities in the United States this year).

This kind of agility is what the year-old Homelessness Museum in London prides itself on, too. “We adapt to different spaces all the time,” Ms. Turtle said. So far, the museum’s offerings have included an event last October to celebrate the 50th anniversary of “Cathy Come Home,” a seminal Ken Loach film broadcast on the BBC that followed the descent into indigence of a fictional working-class British couple. The film is often credited with having changed public attitudes toward homelessness in Britain.

As part of the commemoration, the museum staged a reading of “The Abyss,” the 1965 short story that inspired the film. In April, the museum will have an exhibition at the Tate Modern spotlighting artworks created by Mr. Tovey, the army veteran, and including workshops on homelessness and a display of objects illuminating the homeless experience.

The program, presented as part of a series of exhibitions hosted by the Tate for smaller institutions, provides a striking contrast. The titanic Tate Modern was built on the site of a sprawling former power station: Its original 325-foot-high chimney, still standing, is taller than Big Ben.

The Museum of Homelessness, by contrast, is as nimble and ephemeral as a street urchin in a Dickens novel.